In my recent post, Some Configuration To Solve Common Problems, I got a bit of pushback from GB who said some of the configuration was outdated. That’s true but does it really make much difference? The Emacs Cat has a followup post in which he agrees that some of his configuration is old—just like mine and probably yours—but that it still works.
That’s another nice thing about Emacs: even though new, better methods of doing things are introduced, the old methods continue to work. Sometimes, those old methods will eventually be deprecated but always with a lot of notification including warnings when you use them.
The Emacs Cat’s second post describes some of his custom Elisp that aids editing. Several of them add functionality to Dired, a functionality that everyone should be using. He also has some functions for inserting date/time stamps of various sort. I have several of these myself and the lesson to take away from them is how easy it is to get exactly the format you want.
Finally, there are a few functions that specialize common requirements such as opening new lines, moving to the beginning of the line, and others. These are the sort of functions that every long term Emacs user eventually accumulates so it should be especially useful for beginners to see them written down in a single post.